This game is more movie than game in it's story telling. In a weird way though it is almost fitting that a pseudo mindbending video game about a horror novel author's manuscript was actually a film the entire time.

I am exaggerating, there are obviously the obligatory zombie-, but not actually a zombie, okay maybe they are just a zombie, but with an extra shield mechanic -shooter sections. There are also some decent, often optional "walking sim" parts with additional world building, lore or foreshadowing of the story. The game is serviceable just not for me, I am hating a bit, because I am honestly always disappointed when I choose to play a Video Game instead of watching a Film or a TV Show and then I feel like I would have gotten the same x10 out of rewatching a Lynch (or Nolan, he might unironically enjoy this) flick while playing a mindless zombie shooter on the side.
Like, my favourite part in the first chapter was some silly and short Twilight Zone -eseque video you can watch on a TV in the game. Why am I even playing a game at that that point I have to ask myself?

Starting off with the nod: "Stephen King once wrote that 'Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear." and after that immediately tutorialising how to break and defeat the first "Nightmare" you encounter, and thereby lessening the potential fear of the unknown a player could experience and contradictong that corny opening monologue is baffeling to me.
The animations, sound design and fx alone convey perfectly well that the lamp has an effect on the enemy, figuring that out by yourself would work perfectly fine in a nightmare mystery setting. Why are games this inconfindent in themselves and the player that tjey feel the need to take this small and kind of intriguing revelation away?

"For a moment the repressive feeling from the nightmare I had on the ferry returns" a near comical jumpscare flashes for half a second. The shortness, randomness and how on the nose the attempt at connecting Alan's narrated thoughts to the players emotions were, made this moment kinda silly to me. These Jumpscares keep coming throughout the game and keep getting longer, showing the player more information. And idk, to me that is honestly, at least in theory, an interesting concept to excuse the use of jumpscares, by the nature of the scare getting longer the jump would slowly cease to exist. But they don't really, there is still epileptic ass editing in those moments to compensate for the length I guess. So, to me at least, this minor recurring flash of imagery, which I'm wasting way too much time on in this review, is only an annoying, tension wasting horror gimmick that is halting the gameplay instead of the intriguing, itself slowly revealing narrative exposition it could have been.

Alan Wake gives me confidence to be a writer myself, a profession not even included in the top five artistic delusions I have, but this game bumped it up a bit. The writing in Alan's manuscripts is mediocre at best, there is no way this guy is such a legend that a small town has a life-sized cardboard cutout of him in a Bar.
Damn, is he supposed to be a mediocre cardboard cut out of an author and that is a blatan admission of that? But man self-awareness wouldn't make it any better.
In one of the manuscripts it says "..to describe the dark presence as intelligent would have implied human qualities on something decidedly inhuman" all this sentence is giving me is the implications that intelligence is a quality exclusive to humans. And thats just arrogant human exceptionalism in my book.

I dropped this game after like six+, kinda slogging hours and turned on Twin Peaks instead. If there is some plot-twist that nullifies my complaints about the story related stuff or the game somehow gets way more interesting, I honestly don't really care enough to sit through even a playthrough of it to find out and I did genuinely try that a couple days after, but then again choose to watch something else instead. [Played like a month ago, but I'll log it with todays date for visibility or some shit, idk if that is how it works]